The PHP development team is proud to announce the first beta release of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviors. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

Features added in this beta include several bug fixes, the addition of a callable typehint, a switch to timezone guessing (UTC is assumed if not set) and the mysql/mysqli/pdo_mysql extensions now use mysqlnd by default. There's a lot of smaller changes too - check out the latest NEWS file for the complete list.

Over and over again PHP users complain that next month in PHP's date-string parser doesn't go to the next month, but instead skips to the one after next month.

He describes what happens internally, how PHP bumps up the month and counts the number of days, and how you can use some of newer features in the PHP 5.3 release to get the first day of the next month. Specifically, this means using the "first day of next month" string for the modify() call on the DateTime object. If you're not on PHP 5.3 yet, Derick also includes a method in the comments to do it a slightly different way.

Welcome to part 3 of my 10 part series on PHP. In the first two parts I introduced you to the language and to what software you needed to run it. In this episode we will look at some simple PHP syntax, and we'll write a couple of small scripts to get our feet wet, and get a feel for the language.

Their first script mixes HTML and PHP together to make a "Hello World" web page. They also give the example of a phpinfo function call to get the settings for the current PHP installation.

Finally, I found some time to take CakePHP for a spin. I've heard some really good things about it, and I've been trying to get some time to try it out. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application. I have to say I'm quite impressed.

The post briefly introduces the Model-View-Controller method the framework follows and shows some of the features/benefits it brings with it - the low entry level, its speed, and whether or not it makes for a good "first framework" for other developers.

Sometimes I've seen people say PHP is a bad first language, because it teaches bad programming habits. But is this actually true at all? Often those who say that don't really like PHP themselves either, many times because of equally untrue reasons.

They argue both sides of the situation, mentioning what could make for a good first language, why PHP is a "nearly perfect" fit for it and some arguing points for the other side as to why PHP isn't the best option.

The last few days I've started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn't miss anything which I've used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. [...] Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that's a great benefit.

Most of the issues that she came across from the transition were minor things - keystrokes for shortcuts changed, slowness with the breakpoints - nothing that would stop her from dropping it and going back to the regular Zend Studio 5.5.

For a testing framework I picked PHPUnit. My main reason for picking this was that its fully written in PHP5, it can produce some pretty good reports and the biggest reason is simply because I hear a lot of good stuff about it.

Among his thoughts were mentions of PHPUnit's great documentation (but made it hard to just get started), a bit of unintuitive functionality with the addTestSuite method and some of the pain that it took to get together a full suite of tests.

Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.

Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.

Hehe, some might say, that those 10 lines of C code are not even worth calling it a patch. Especially, since it was mostly copy and paste work and since Christian Schneider also adviced me for some improvement. Anyway, Marcus just commited my enhancement to pathinfo(), which adds a new field "filename" to the returned array of path elements.

His patch adds a much needed output parameter to the pathinfo function's results - filename. He talks briefly about the process of making the change and how long it took him on the first shot (2 hours), but now his hard work has paid off. The update will be a part of PHP 5.2.

For about 4 hours now, the PHP Vikinger is in full swing. Everyone arrived between 10 and 11, and together we hacked up a makeshift agenda. Remember that this is an "unconference", so attendees are in full charge of the whole event. Our lead viking Zak, inspired by the mighty power of Thor himself, took it upon him to moderate the scheduling and get everything started. Now, everyone who wants gets up and does a presentation, starts a discussion or - as Kris is currently doing - stipulates brainstorming with the attending core developers and other PHP nerds.

He also mentions a discussion about what PHP's lacking and a talk from Ilia about PHP security issues. Sounds like things are going great so far!